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Herman Melville’s 1855 Story “The Tartarus of Maids” both enacts and ironizes the phenomenon this essay aims to explicate: the pervasive sexualization of antebellum working-class women in cultural representation. The story recounts the January visit of the male narrator, a “seedsman” who seeks supplies for his growing business, to a paper mill in the remote, treacherous, “shaggy-wooded” mountains of New England (324). The paper mill’s Dantean setting helps introduce the story as industrial allegory and sets the stage for the encounter that follows (324-25). Melville’s narrator “take[s] in” the “scene” in one “sweeping glance,” and-as in many accounts of male visitors to the Lowell mills-the scene is infused with eroticism; that the narrator’s guide is called “Cupid” suggests Love’s reign in the factory, while the first machine the narrator sees produces “rose-hued note paper” impressed with a “wreath of roses”-seemingly the stuff of “love-letters” (327-29), perhaps the pink and white Valentines (often decorated with Cupid’s image) mass produced by the 1840s (Shank). However, contrary to the “romance of labor” penned by factory celebrants, the narrator’s re-presentation of factory work is characterized not by the idealized portrayal of “factory Queens” but by images of female servility and dehumanization. In “Tartarus,” the factory appropriates the women’s sexuality, draining the pale, “blank-looking” women of erotic and reproductive vitality; for Melville, the figured contrast between the “rosy paper” and the “pallid cheek[s]” captures the tragic reversals that mill work entails (328-29). Indeed, the paper factory is explicitly designated a realm of perverse coupling: phallic, “piston-like” machines (called “iron animal[s]”) are tended by “passive-looking” women, “pale virgin[s]” who serve as the machines’ “tame minister[s]” (328, 334). This motif culminates in a startling image of industrial reproduction: the paper making machine is located in a “room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat,” where the “egg-like substance” of pulp is “developed” into “germinous particles” of “paper” (331). If the mill is a realm of sexual coupling and reproductivity, it is seemingly devoid of female desire: Cupid, “gliding about among the passive-looking girls-like a gold fish through hueless waves,” is not the emissary of a voluptuous, impetuous goddess but an errand-boy among “unresisting” female servants (329). Remarking that “the human voice was banished from the spot,” the narrator drives home the story’s...